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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26352280">yellow, yellow, gold, and ochre</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_Orange_one/pseuds/the_Orange_one'>the_Orange_one</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Formula 1 RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Additional Warnings In Author's Note, And most importantly, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Gen, Horror, Magical Realism, Minor Character Death, SAVIOR PIERRE, Temporary Character Death, gratuitous Monza 2020 feelings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 04:55:23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,768</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26352280</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_Orange_one/pseuds/the_Orange_one</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>They told Pierre to not even try.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Pierre Gasly &amp; Anthoine Hubert, Pierre Gasly &amp; Charles Leclerc</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>yellow, yellow, gold, and ochre</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>OH BOY.</p><p>Please, please heed the tags. This is a dark story, with a bit of an open ending. I’ll go into more depth in the end notes about the character death tags. There will be spoilers there.</p><p>BIG thank you to gentleau &amp; wintrs for being the angel and devil on my shoulders, respectively, and for looking this thing over when i had no fuckin clue what I was doing</p><p>title from <a href="https://poets.org/poem/detail-hayfield">here</a></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They told Pierre to not even try.</p><p>There’s something dark in the paddock, grown twisted and inextricably linked with the sport over the years.</p><p>It’s claimed many lives, too many to count, too many of Pierre’s own friends.</p><p>Last year, it’d taken Anthoine.</p><p>And then Charles, not even a month later, gone in after Anthoine, vowing to save him, certain that he was still alive, somewhere behind all the choking vines and eyes that look the other way.</p><p>The thing is, it’s not always sudden like it was with Anthoine, who was stolen away, or Charles, who walked straight into it like it was welcoming him. Sometimes it’s slow. Sometimes the dark void only penetrates halfway in before it stops.</p><p>Some days Pierre thinks Max is gone already. There’s not much left of him if he isn’t.</p><p>With Dany, he’d been sucked in while sitting next to Pierre in the garage one day. Pierre had grabbed his hand and dragged Dany back to him, but there’s been something missing in Dany’s eyes ever since. He hadn’t come all the way back.</p><p>The darkness lurks at the edge of Pierre’s vision everywhere he looks nowadays. He thinks it’s worse for him than for most of the other drivers. It feels like it’s beckoning him in.</p><p>When he arrives in Spa, it’s worse than ever.</p><p>He hears Charles’ voice every second he’s not in the car, like the darkness is mocking him. Charles asks him to join them. He says it’s not so bad on the other side.</p><p>Pierre blocks him out and avoids closing his eyes longer than he needs to blink.</p><p>By the end of the weekend he’s drained, and the circles under his eyes are darker than they’ve ever been. He catches a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror and for a second he thinks it’s Charles.</p><p>In Monza, the darkness has abated somewhat, down to a low simmer in the back of his mind. Every part of his body still aches for Anthoine and for Charles, but that’s how it’s been every day for the last eighteen months. He has it under control this weekend.</p><p>The sun in northern Italy is bright but bleak, lower in the sky than Pierre remembers it being.</p><p>He tells himself that it’s because it’s nearing autumn, and not because his entire world has shifted on its axis since he was last here.</p><p>Pierre must have let his guard slip, grown too relaxed after the constant misery of last weekend, because when he enters the paddock on Sunday he turns a corner and comes face to face with a waking nightmare.</p><p>He sees a wall of black, and maybe something writhing within, but he gets the awful feeling that his eyes aren’t processing everything that’s in front of him. There’s something in there that his subconscious doesn’t want him to see.</p><p>Shaking, he takes a breath to scream, but he can’t.</p><p>He tries to speak, and the words won’t come. </p><p>He slowly begins to walk backwards down the hall the way he came, taking small and careful steps. If he runs he’ll look like prey, and that’s the last thing he wants.</p><p>Just as he makes it to the corner, he hears a whisper from the blackness.</p><p>It’s Charles’ voice. All it says is Pierre’s name, but it freezes him in place.</p><p>“Charles?” he asks, daring to hope.</p><p>“Yes,” hisses the limb closest to him.</p><p>Pierre hesitates before taking his next step back. He has to believe Charles was right. He has to believe they can make it out alive.</p><p>He steels his spine and steps forward instead.</p><p><em> For Charles </em>, he thinks.</p><p>Another step.</p><p>
  <em> For Anthoine. </em>
</p><p>He marches ahead and doesn’t falter.</p><p>Inside the evil, reality is distorted. Pierre can see ceilings and floors but he doesn’t know how far away they are. There are faces in the walls and tremors wrack his body every few steps.</p><p>The corridors stop being distinguishable as the bowels of the paddock almost immediately. The ground is shifting. There are vines—or veins?—on the walls, and he starts to develop a pounding headache the farther in he goes.</p><p>But he can still hear Charles’ voice, beckoning him deeper, so he presses on.</p><p>He walks for what feels like miles. His feet begin to tire and his vision starts to grow black around the edges even more than the gloom that already surrounds him.</p><p>“Charles?” he rasps. “Please.”</p><p>He blinks and there is a throne in front of him, raised high on a dais and spiraling up into the inky sky.</p><p>The throne is towering, dripping with black, and its edges are sharp unlike every other surface Pierre has seen so far. </p><p>The chill that has been setting in ever since he stepped into the blackness has permeated all the way to his bones. He feels hopeless. He feels lost.</p><p>
  <em> Is this how Charles felt, when he came here last year? Is this how Anthoine felt, after he was taken? </em>
</p><p>He raises his head and his eyes find the throne again. Sitting in the center of the seat is something small and wet.</p><p>Pierre doesn’t want to know what it is but he can’t look away.</p><p>He approaches the twisted trunk of the throne and has to turn away before he reaches the top step of the dais. He dry heaves, hands braced on his knees.</p><p>It’s a human heart.</p><p>
  <em>This can’t be all that’s left.</em>
</p><p>“Charles!” He cries. It’s all he knows how to say anymore. If Charles isn’t here, if he can’t find him, what’s the point?</p><p>Pierre crumples on the top stair and puts his head in his hands. He wasn’t raised to be a quitter, but he wasn’t raised for this either. He feels so helpless.</p><p>He doesn’t know how much time passes him by, sitting on the steps, but he comes to when a hand lands on his shoulder and a voice whispers, “Pierre.”</p><p>It’s Charles, crouched next to him, and real, and firmly corporeal. He doesn’t disappear when Pierre blinks. The red of his shirt is so bright it hurts to look at after so long wandering in the dark. Pierre’s eyes water at the sight of him.</p><p>“Oh,” sobs Pierre. </p><p>Charles’ eyes are blank, like Max’s, and his veins are dark and prominent, like Dany’s.</p><p>Whatever happened in the last year, Charles is no longer a creature of the light. </p><p>Pierre shakes his head in disbelief. Charles is alive. There’s still hope for him.</p><p>“What happened to you?” Pierre demands, drinking in the sight of him.</p><p>Anthoine is nowhere to be seen. Pierre fears maybe Charles never was able to find him.</p><p>Charles smiles wryly, like he’s letting Pierre in on a joke.</p><p>“I failed,” he says simply.</p><p>Pierre’s heart sinks. Of course Charles would blame himself for the loss of something that was never his to control. Of course he would put Anthoine’s death down to something so matter of fact. Anthoine could not be saved. Charles failed.</p><p>“I don’t believe you,” says Pierre, and then, tracing the deep blue under Charles’ eyes with his thumb, he asks again, “What happened to you?”</p><p>Charles shudders and Pierre finally reaches out. He holds Charles tight to his chest. They wrap around each other like they always have, and it’s a cold comfort in a place like this, but Pierre clings to him all the same.</p><p>“I couldn’t get out,” says Charles. “We can’t leave.”</p><p>“What do you mean,” says Pierre, still refusing to move away. “Of course we can.”</p><p>Charles tells him in hushed tones about the entity that visits the throne, the way it consumes, decaying, festering here in the dark. No one that gets too close ever comes back.</p><p>“I’ve never seen it,” confesses Charles.</p><p>“Do you know who...” Pierre tries to ask. “Who that is?” He points to the heart on the throne.</p><p>Charles stiffens. “No,” he says. “They used to be alive, that is all I know.”</p><p>Pierre deliberately doesn’t ask how Charles knows this.</p><p>“It’s like a sick reminder that there is nothing for us here,” Charles says. “There is no love in this place.”</p><p>Charles’ admission stirs something deep in Pierre’s brain. He scrambles for anything to hang his hope on. Anything that could help them get out of here.</p><p>Pierre starts recalling half-remembered stories his grandma told him when he was little, about old magic that deals in absolutes and the healing power of love.</p><p>Something wells up deep inside him, something too big for him to name, but if he had to it could only be classified as love.</p><p>He tells Charles to step back. He ignores the darkness pressing in at the fringes of his mind, like a hand trying to push him backwards.</p><p>Pierre reaches deep inside himself, finds his edges, pries his ribs apart, digs his fingers into the softness of himself, into the tough sinews of himself, and grasps for his heart.</p><p>It’s still there. It’s still beating.</p><p>Pierre thinks of his mother and father. He thinks of Dany and Max and Anthoine and Charles.</p><p><em> I love them, </em> he thinks wildly. <em> Let it be enough. </em></p><p>He pulls out his heart and offers it to the darkness. </p><p>There is blood running down his arms, so much blood covering his hands. It’s hot like it’s still a part of him.</p><p>As soon as the heart is out of his hands, as soon as it is no longer his, the specter of evil flickers and blinks out before Pierre’s eyes with an awful sucking sound, like all the breath is being pulled out of his body at once.</p><p>His vision whites out, and he hears Charles let out a strangled cry like he’s been kneecapped by the same feeling taking a hold of Pierre.</p><p>He gasps and isn’t surprised to feel tears running down his cheeks.</p><p>The blur of his vision fades from white to red. He blinks against the haze. </p><p>At once Pierre knows they are no longer in a place of evil. It’s as if he’s walking on air.</p><p>“We did it,” he breathes, disbelieving. “Charles, we made it.”</p><p>Charles is silent. He may yet be crying.</p><p>Pierre spins in frantic circles, but everywhere he looks is bright and glowing, no trace of darkness anywhere.</p><p>He closes his eyes, turns his face toward the Milanese sun, and feels the warmth on his face. </p><p>It’s summer. Soon it will be autumn. He’d forgotten that, but he’s glad he’s here to feel it now.</p><p>He grasps Charles’ cold hand with his own.</p><p>He squeezes once.</p><p>Charles squeezes back.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>warnings, cont'd: I’ve tagged for character death both because of the inclusion of Anthoine, who in this story died at the same time he did irl, and because Charles is also (arguably) dead at the beginning of this story. I did not use the archive warning for major character death because I don’t see Anthoine as a major character and Charles is alive by the end of the fic.</p><p>If there’s anything else you feel I need to warn for please let me know in a comment or on <a href="https://shoeydaniel.tumblr.com">tumblr</a> (I have anon on if that’s better for u) and I’ll update this warning!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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